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<TD align="left" valign="middle"><H3 class="title">Habari Xenu - About RSS/Atom News Feeds</H3></TD>
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<B>What are news feeds?</B><BR>
News feeds are a way of syndicating news and other information. Major news
sites like BBC, New York Times, Washingon Post, Wired and news-oriented
community sites like Slashdot, Metafilter, and personal weblogs publish
summaries of their content in a standard format. When such a summary is
published, it is easier for software (i.e., News Aggregators like Habari
Xenu), search engines and even other websites to easily track changing
content.<P>

News feeds are not just for news. News feeds today carry news headlines, 
blogs, discussion forums, software announcements and much more. Pretty
much anything that can be broken down into discrete content items has the
potential to be syndicated as a news feed.<P>

<B>What is RSS?</B><BR>

RSS is a standard for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites.
It is variously said to be an acronym of Really Simple Syndication, Rich
Site Summary or RDF Site Summary. RSS is a lightweight multipurpose
extensible metadata description and syndication format.<P>

It is the most popular format in which content is syndicated.<P>

<B>Versions of RSS</B><BR>
RSS 0.9 was introduced in 1999 by <a href="http://home.netscape.com/">Netscape</a>
as a channel description framework / content-gathering mechanism for their
<a href="http://my.netscape.com">My Netscape Network</a> (MNN) portal. A
by-product of this was the widespread adoption of XML-based lightweight 
syndication format like RSS by many.<P>

RSS 0.91, re-dubbed "Rich Site Summary," was published in 2000 by Radio
Userland's Dave Weiner. It expanded RSS and moved it away from its RDF
roots. The standard was further extended into RSS 0.92 (December 2000)
and RSS 0.94 (Aug 2002).<P>

RSS 2.0 is a an effort to consolidate all the different variants and
eliminate incompatibilities.<P>

<B>What is Atom?</B><BR>
"Atom is an XML-based file format intended to allow lists of information,
known as "feeds", to be synchronised between publishers and consumers.
Feeds are composed of a number of items, known as "entries", each with
an extensible set of attached metadata. The primary use case that Atom
addresses is for syndicating Web content such as Weblogs and news
headlines to other Web sites and directly to consumers. However, nothing
precludes it from being used for other purposes and types of content." 
(The Atom Syndication Format 0.3)

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<a href="chrome://global/content/MPL-1.1.html">Copyright &copy; 2003-2004</a> <a href="http://openscroll.org/" target="_blank">Sudhakar "Thaths" Chandra</a><BR>
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